Spring-time in the North Sea--Snow on a British Battleship _Frontispiece_ FACING PAGE Marines drilling on the quarterdeck of a British Battleship 24 Fifteen-inch guns on a British Battleship 25 A forest of shells in a corner of one of England's great shell filling factories 86 A light railway bringing up ammunition 87 One of the wards of a base hospital, visited by the King 132 A Howitzer in the act of firing 133 ENGLAND'S EFFORT I Dear H. Your letter has found me in the midst of work quite unconnected with this hideous war in which for the last eighteen months we in England have lived and moved and had our being. My literary profession, indeed, has been to me, as to others, since August 4th, 1914, something to be interposed for a short time, day by day, between a mind tormented and obsessed by the spectacle of war and the terrible reality it could not otherwise forget. To take up one's pen and lose oneself for a while in memories of life as it was long, long before the war--there was refreshment and renewal in that! Once--last spring--I tried to base a novel on a striking war incident which had come my way. Impossible! The zest and pleasure which for any story-teller goes with the first shaping of a story died away at the very beginning. For the day's respite had gone. The little "wind-warm" space had disappeared. Life and thought were all given up, without mercy or relief, to the fever and nightmare of the war. I fell back upon my early recollections of Oxford thirty, forty years ago--and it was like rain in the desert. So that, in the course of months it had become a habit with me never to _write_ about the war; and outside the hours of writing to think and talk of nothing else.